Secrets of That New-Car Smell

A rose by any other name would likely smell like, oh, gunmetal and maybe tennis balls.

With a straight face, engineers must suspend samples in a common glass canning jar above 30 milliliters of water, close the jar tightly, and bake it in an oven at 40 degrees Celsius for 16 hours. A jury of smellers (at least six people) then opens the jar, smells, and rates it according to the following:

No odor.

Detectable, but not disturbing.

Disturbing.

Extremely disturbing.

There is no category for "new-car smell."

In 1988, Ford developed an electronic nose, an expensive piece of machinery which proved to be a disappointment. No matter how extensively the electronic nose was programmed, subtle nuances were missed. "There's no substitute for the human nose," said Graham. "The human nose knows instinctively what smells bad. We don't use the electronic nose anymore."

Like other car manufacturers, Ford works to eliminate offensive odors rather than creating pleasant ones. "But almost everything has some smell," said Graham.

General Motors does not have a standardized smell test, but damned if those Cadillacs don't smell good. Most people attribute that to Nuance leather. Jim Embach, design technology manager for the General Motors Design Center, worked on the team that developed Nuance, and he said they actually built entire cars with an assortment of materials and then had customers sit in them and rate them. "A total contextual experience," he said. According to Embach, the test cars were then dismantled.

How leather gets to smell so good is a real feat, since the tanning process removes virtually all the cow odor, which is a good thing. The products used to soften and shine the leather give it its smell. "Most leathers used to be processed with fish oil," said Embach. "You only thought it smelled good because you were holding a Coach bag or sitting in an expensive car. Close your eyes, and you'd have smelled whale blubber."

That was the Corinthian-leather smell that Ricardo Montalban was pushing for Chrysler back in the '70s, and the Connolly-leather smell that Her Majesty's leather company was so proud of before it went kaput.

"The beauty of leather is that it is very sensuous," said Pat Oldenkamp, vice-president of design and marketing for Eagle Ottawa, a major supplier of leather for the automotive industry. "We spend a lot of time making sure that the touch of the leather is right, the smell and color. It's all important." It is Eagle Ottawa that provides Nuance leather for those sexy Cadillacs.

Fish oil, these days, has been replaced by synthetic products for finishing leathers.

"The new-car smell is a chemical smell," said Stuart Walman, vice-president and general manager of Medo Industries, a subsidiary of Shell Lubricants that developed a deodorizing spray called Ozium, available at auto-parts stores and carwashes. The words "That New Car Smell" are emblazoned in big letters on the can.

Ozium was created in the 1940s as a sanitizing spray, but it eventually caught on with car people. Dealerships use it to freshen used cars. Car detailers use it. Car owners use it to keep their cars smelling nice. Walman, affectionately known in the business as "the Nose," is comfortable admitting that smell is a valuable marketing tool. "Call the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia," he said. "It does plenty of olfactory studies for the automotive industry."